Re: Tooling and workflows meeting at OSS EU Lyon

[Dmitry Vyukov <dvyukov@google.com>]

On Fri, Oct 25, 2019 at 1:17 PM Laurent Pinchart
<laurent.pinchart@ideasonboard.com> wrote:
>
> Hi Konstantin,
>
> On Thu, Oct 24, 2019 at 04:58:03PM -0400, Konstantin Ryabitsev wrote:
> > Hi, everyone:
> >
> > So, if I read everything correctly, the meeting shall take place at OSS EU
> > Lyon, on Tuesday, from 14:00 to 15:00. The following people have
> > expressed interest in attending:
> >
> > - Steven Rostedt
> > - Greg Kroah-Hartman
> > - Dmitry Vyukov
> > - Konstantin Ryabitsev
> > - Christian Brauner
> > - Laurent Pinchart
> > - Jon Corbet
> > - Daniel Vetter
> > - Nicolas Belouin
> > - Shuah Khan
> >
> > (If your name is not on this list but you're planning to attend, please
> > follow up.)
> >
> > I have confirmed that we can use the Developer Lounge, which will
> > contain either a whiteboard or a flip chart. Alternatively, if you think
> > we should get a dedicated meeting room, we can book one on-site. It's on
> > a first-come, first-served basis and it doesn't look like I can book it
> > before actually getting there. I will send exact details of the location
> > on Monday.
>
> Thank you for organising this.
>
> > Since we only have an hour, I propose that we focus on a couple of
> > topics and perhaps keep them anchored to the immediate future,
> > discussing evolutionary changes as opposed to grand schemes that will
> > require changing half the known world.
> >
> > I can discuss any of the following topics at length:
> >
> > 1. Current tools and automation offered at kernel.org, plus new features
> >    they are likely to see in the future that are interesting to both
> >    developers and maintainers:
> >     - public-inbox
> >     - patchwork
> >     - bugzilla
> >     - pr-tracker-bot and git-patchwork-bot
> >
> > 2. Proposed enhancements to the email-based workflow
> >     - cryptographic attestation of patches
> >     - adding (and requiring) base tree information in submitted patches/series
> >     - git-to-ML bridges ("turn this pull request into a well-formatted
> >       patch series and send it to the right places")
> >
> > 3. CI and bot integration
> >     - identifying the data that maintainers/developers want to see
> >     - communicating structured data over email
> >     - providing consumable feeds of CI/bot jobs (as public-inbox
> >       repositories?)
> >     - avoiding bug duplication
> >     - recognizing when a bug is fixed and following up on issues that
> >       nobody has taken on
> >
> > 4. Maintainer tooling
> >     - adaptability of existing tools for kernel development, such as:
> >       - GitHub/GitLab
> >       - SourceHut
> >       - Gerrit
> >
> >     - building on top of public-inbox feeds to create a tool that can:
> >       - track patches obtained from multiple sources (multiple mailing
> >         lists, individual developer feeds, bot activity feeds, etc)
> >       - collect the usual trailers (Reviewed-By's, etc)
> >       - show interdiffs
> >       - send automated templated replies
> >       - apply series to a local git repository (streamlining "save these
> >         patches as an mbox, make a new branch, run git-am")
> >
> > Unfortunately, that's enough topics to fill a 3-day mini-summit. :)
> > Which ones are folks most interested in discussing during the meet-up,
> > and which ones should be targeted for hallway discussions?
>
> I usually favour a top-down approach when discussing these topics,
> starting with the big picture. I would thus have proposed discussing how
> we can address the problems raised by the forge enthousiasts while not
> compromising on the requirements of the decentralisation advocates.

+1

Spot improvements to a single system are much less disputable.


> This being said, I think it would indeed take way more time than we have
> allocated for this meeting. We could this pick one of the tools that we
> think has the most potential today, and discuss how to move it towards
> our long term goal that we haven't agreed on yet :-)
>
> I think the maintainer tooling topic is the one that would benefit the
> most from face to face discussios as there's more brainstorming there,
> while the other three could possibly be discussed by e-mail more easily.